Earthly Joys

Summer 1628

The message came in the middle of June, one of the best months of the year for a gardener. John had started his day’s work in the rose garden, dead-heading the blowsy blooms and tossing the petals into a basket for the still room. They would be dried and used in pomanders, or for scattering in the linen cupboards to scent the duke’s sheets. Or they might be claimed by the cooks and candied to decorate the duke’s sweetmeats. Everything in the garden, from drowsily humming bees to falling rosy pale petals, was the duke’s and grew for his pleasure. Except he was not here to see them.

At midday John went around to the front of the house to see the young limes, planted in the long, gently curving double avenue. He had a thought that they might grow better-shaped if their lower branches were pruned, and he had a small axe and a saw for the purpose, and a lad coming behind with a ladder. But before he had done more than whistle to the lad to set the ladder before the first tree, he heard hoofbeats.

John turned, raised his hand to shield his eyes and saw, like a dream, like a long-awaited vision, the single rider still a mile off, his lathered horse going from gray to black as it passed from brilliant sunlight into deep green shadow down the drive. John stepped out from the shade of the trees on to the broad sunny road, waiting in the hot light for the messenger, knowing that it would be his summons, knowing that he must obey. He felt for a moment that it was Death himself, with his scythe over his shoulder, riding between the trees with the drunken bees buzzing wildly and the leaves dripping with nectar and pollen.

John felt a darkness within himself as if the shade of the limes had cast a deep green into his very blood, and a coldness which he thought must be fear. He had never known fear before in this bleak premonitory way. He understood now, for the first time, why the pressed men had whispered to him as he went through the ranks: “Ask him to send us home, Mr. Tradescant, ask him to turn back.” Now he felt as slavish as they, as unmanned as they.

The rider came slowly toward him and Tradescant put up his hand for the letter as if he were warding off a blow from a knife.

“How did you know it was for you?” the messenger asked, sliding from his horse’s back and loosening the girth.

“I have been waiting for it since I heard he was returning to Rhé,” John said.

“Then you will be the only willing recruit,” the man said cheerfully. “There were riots outside his house when the sailors heard he was taking them back there. His carriage is stoned every time he takes it out. They are saying that the expedition is cursed and that it will fall into a whirlpool which stretches down to Hell itself. They drink to his death in the ale houses; they pray for his downfall in the chapels.”

“That’s enough,” John said roughly. “Go and take your horse to the stable. I won’t hear the duke traduced on his own land by his own servant.”

The man shrugged and twitched the reins over his horse’s head. “I’ve left his service. I am on my way to my own home.”

“You have work to go to?”

“No,” he said. “But I’d rather beg from door to door than go with the duke to the Island of Rue. I’m not a fool. I know how it will be commanded, and how it will be paid, and what the risks will be.”

John nodded, his face betraying nothing. Then he turned away and walked from the avenue, across the grass lawn to the lake. He made his way down the pretty little path to the landing stage opposite the boathouse where Buckingham used to row out on summer evenings, sometimes with his wife Kate in the stern, sometimes alone with a rod and line. John sat on the landing stage and looked across the water. The yellow flag irises were in flower as he had promised his master they would be; the fountain they had designed together played into the warm silent air of the afternoon. The water lilies he had planted bobbed gently as the wind breathed across the smooth surface of the lake, their buds just splitting to show cream and white petals. The ducks had had a second brood of ducklings and they came and quacked around him, hoping for corn. John held the letter in his hand, looking at the heavy seal on the fold of the thick cream notepaper. For a moment he did not break it, he did not shatter the impress of Buckingham’s ring; for a moment he sat in the sunshine and thought what he would be feeling if this was a letter from a master who loved him, from a man who loved as an equal. How it would be for him now, if Buckingham was his lover as well as his lord.

John thought that if they were lovers still his heart would leap at the sight of the sealed note; he would be happy at being ordered to his lord’s side; he would go glad-hearted, wherever he was ordered. If they were lovers he would go with his lord to the Isle of Rue, to that bleak island, to that certain death, with a sort of mad joy, that a love as encompassing and wild as theirs could only end in death and that there would be something erotic and powerful about it ending in a battle and the two of them side by side as comrades.

John rubbed his hand across his eyes. No point in dreaming like a lovesick maid and gazing out across the water. This would not be a love letter; these would be orders that must be obeyed whatever his private feelings. He tore the fold of the paper and opened the letter.

John,

I shall need my best traveling coach and some suits of clothes, my hats and the new diamonds. We will need a couple of cows and some hens – order everything as I would wish.

Bring it all to me and meet me at Portsmouth; we will sail at the beginning of July without fail.

You will sail with me and be at my side, as before.

Villiers.

John read the letter once, and then read it again. It was his death warrant.

The evening was very warm. John watched the midges dancing over the still water, his legs dangling above the glassy surface of the lake like an idle boy’s. Even now he found it hard to believe that he must leave all this, and never see it again. The garden he had made, the trees he had planted, the vegetables and flowers he had introduced to New Hall – to England – all this would be taken from him, and he would die on an island half-rock and half-marsh for a cause he had never believed in, serving a master who was no good.

John’s long unthinking uncritical loyalty to his masters had been destroyed. And when John lost his faith in his master, he lost his faith in the world. If his master was not a better man, closer to the angels than his servant, then the king was not set higher again, even closer to heaven. And if the king was not divine, then he was not infallible, as John had always believed. And if the king was not infallible then all the questions that thinking men were posing, about the king’s new powers and the king’s mismanagement of affairs, were questions that John should have been asking. He should have been asking them years ago.

He felt like a fool who had neglected the chance of a great education. Cecil had been his first master and had taught him not to think of principle but of practice. If he had watched Cecil he would have seen a man who always acted in public as if the king were divine, but always plotted in private to protect him like any fallible mortal. Cecil had not been fooled by the masque of royalty; he was a man like Inigo Jones whose work was to illustrate and support it. Jones had built the staircase and a marble bathroom at New Hall; Tradescant had watched him at work. This was not a priest before the mysteries; this was a man doing a skilled job. He made a stair, he made an illusion of majesty, all the same work, all in the same day. But Tradescant, even with the example of Cecil as chief stage manager before him, had been taken in by the show and the costumes and the ingenious machinery, and had thought that he had seen gods when all that had been before him was a cunning old woman, Elizabeth; her nephew James, a lecher; and his son, Charles, a fool.

John did not feel vengeful; the habit of loving and loyalty toward his masters and beyond them to the king went too deep for that. He felt that he would have to endure the loss of faith as if it were his own fault. To lose faith in the king and his lord was very like to losing faith in God. It was gone but a man still went through the rituals of attendance, and hat-doffing and minding his tongue, so as not to spread doubt among others. John might doubt his lord and his king but no one beyond his immediate family would ever know it. He might doubt that God had ordered him to obey the commandments or had recently included a commandment to obey the king, but he would not stand up in church and deny God when the preacher recited the new prayers for the king and queen which had been added as a collect for the day. John had been raised to be a man of loyalty and duty; he could not step out of his track just because his heart was broken and his faith gone.

For the duke his lover he thought he would never feel anything but a pain where his heart should be, and ice where his blood should be, and an ache where his belly should be. He did not blame his lord for turning away from his gardener to the court. The very suggestion was a foolish one. Of course Buckingham would cleave to the court, however well he was loved by his servants. It was Tradescant who blamed himself for forgetting that the man he loved was a great man, a man of the highest degree in the land, second only to the king. It was folly to think that he would need Tradescant in the days of his glory as he had needed him in the days of the voyage home when the ghosts of the men they had left behind cried every night in the rigging.

As John gave the orders in the stable and the big house to get the carriage ready, as he rode down to Manor Farm and requisitioned two cows in milk, he knew that Buckingham had forgotten him as a lover but trusted him completely as a servant, the most faithful servant of them all who would do everything, and overlook nothing.

Buckingham believed that John was his faithful servant; and Buckingham was right. As John ordered them to pack the duke’s best clothes, and put the diamonds in a purse to wear around his own neck, he knew that he was acting the part of a faithful servant, and that he would act that part until he died. He would take the traveling coach and the clothes, the hats and the new diamonds, some cows and some hens, all the long way down the road to Portsmouth, see them loaded with the press-ganged soldiers on the Triumph and set sail with them to his death.

“We will go to our deaths like herded cattle,” John said quietly to himself as he watched them pull the great traveling coach from the stables and start to polish the gilded ornaments on the corners of the roof. “Like the milch cows which low as they are pushed on board. I am bound by my oath that I will be his until death, and I see now that this was what he meant. He will never have finished with me, nor with any in his company, until we are all dead.”

He turned away, his knee aching as he walked on the uneven cobbles of the stable yard, and went round to the pleasure gardens to find J, his son, who would now inherit all that he had, and would have to become head of the little family, for John was going to the war again and knew this time that he would not come back.

The pleasure garden had been laid out with fountains and waterworks designed by the engineer Cornelius van Drebbel. J had ordered the drying and cleaning of an enormous round marble bowl at the foot of a cascade, and was splashing round inside the bowl checking that it was perfectly clean before he let the water flow back in. In the heat of the day it was a pleasant job, and J was a man young enough to take pleasure in playing about with a cascade of water and calling it work. At the side of the fountain, in the shade, was a hogshead tub squirming with carp waiting to be returned to the water. J looked up when he heard his father’s step on the white gravel and as soon as he saw his father’s face he climbed out of the marble bowl and came toward him, shaking his thick black hair like a spaniel coming out of a river.

“Bad news, Father?”

John nodded. “I am to go to Rhé.”

J held out his hand for the letter and John hesitated only for a moment before passing it to him. J read it swiftly and thrust it back.

“Carriage!” he cried scathingly. “Best diamonds! He has learned nothing.”

“It is his way,” John said. “He has the grand manner and he rides out the storms.”

“Can we say you are sick?” J asked.

John shook his head.

“I will go in your place; I mean it.”

“Your place is here,” John said. “You have a child on the way, perhaps an heir for us, someone to grow the chestnut trees on.” The two men smiled at each other, and then John was grave again. “You’re well provided for, there’s our own land, and the fee from the Whitehall granary. There’s our own cabinet of curiosities; I know they are nothing much yet but you could raise a few pounds on them if you’re ever in need, and with the training you have had under me at Lord Wootton’s garden and here, you could work anywhere in Europe.”

“I won’t stay with the duke,” J said. “I won’t stay here. I shall go to Virginia where there is neither a duke nor a king.”

“Yes,” Tradescant said. “But, of course, he may not come back from Rhé, either.”

“He came home last time without a scratch on him and was greeted in triumph,” J said resentfully.

“Don’t make an enemy of him.”

“He has taken my father away from me for years,” J said. “And now he wants to take you to your death. How do you think I feel?”

John shook his head. “Feel as you like. But don’t make an enemy of him. If you go against him, you go against the king and that is treason and mortal danger.”

“He is too great for me to challenge; I know that. He is too great altogether. There is not a man in England who does not hate and fear him, and now we are to go to war under him again when we know he does not know how to command, he cannot organize supplies, he cannot order an attack, he does not know how the business should be done. How should he know? He was a country squire’s son and got his place by his skill in dancing and talking… and sodomy.”

John flinched. “Enough, J. Enough.”

“I wish to God we had never come here,” the younger man said passionately.

John looked back down the years to the moment that he first saw Buckingham as green as a sapling in the dark allée at New Hall. “We wanted the best gardens in the country. We had to come here.”

The two men were silent.

“Will you tell Mother?” J asked eventually.

“I’ll tell her now,” John said. “She’ll be grieved. You will keep her to live with you and provide for her well when I am gone, J.”

“Of course,” J said.

Elizabeth packed John’s clothes in silence, including his winter boots and warm cloaks and blankets.

“I probably won’t need those; we will be back before autumn,” John said, trying to be cheerful.

She was folding his clothes and putting them into a big leather sack. “He will never sail on time,” she said. “He never does. Nothing will be ready on time and you will be sailing out into the autumn storms, and setting siege as winter comes. You will need your warm cloak, and Jane’s father has sent me a bolt of oilskin to wrap your clothes in and try to keep them dry.”

“Are you nearly ready? I have his wagons loaded and his coach is ready to go.”

“All finished.” She pulled the drawstring tight.

He held out his arms to her and she looked at him, her face very grave. “God bless you, my John,” she said.

He wrapped his arms around her and felt the familiar warmth of the band of her cap and her smooth hair against his cheek. “I am sorry for the grief I have given you,” he said, his voice choked. “Before God, Elizabeth, I have loved you dearly.”

She did not reprove his swearing, but tightened her grip around his waist.

“Look after my grandchild,” he said, and tried to make a joke: “And my chestnut trees!”

“Don’t go!” she cried suddenly. “Please, John, don’t go. You can get to London and on a ship to Virginia in a day and a night, before he even knows you have left him. Please!”

He put his hands behind his back and unfastened her fingers. “You know I cannot run away.”

He picked up his bag and went down the stairs, his tread uneven as the arthritis in his knee made him limp. She stayed where she was for a moment, and then ran after him.

Buckingham’s great carriage was drawn up outside their little cottage, but John could not ride in it without the lord’s express permission, and Buckingham had forgotten to tell John he could travel in comfort. John slung his bag in the back of the carter’s wagon and cast an experienced eye over the armed men who would ride before and after him, to guard the duke’s treasures against violent beggars, highwaymen or a mob that might rise up against the sight of his crest in any of the towns on the way.

John pulled himself up beside the carter on the wagon’s driving seat and turned to wave to Elizabeth. J and Jane stood beside her at the cottage doorway, looking out as John gave the signal for the carriage and the wagons to move.

He meant to call out, “Good-bye! God bless!,” but he felt the words stick in his throat. He meant to smile and wave his hat so that the last sight they had of him was that of a cheery smile and a man going willingly. But Elizabeth’s white face pierced him like a knife and he could only pull his hat from his head as a mark of respect for her and let the wagon pull out, and away from her.

He turned in his seat and watched them grow smaller and smaller, obscured by the dust of the luggage train, until the wagon turned the corner into the great avenue and he could see them no more. He could not even hear the bees above the rumble of wheels, and he had never smelled the heady perfume of the limes.

Buckingham was not at Portsmouth, as he had said he would be. The fleet was ready, the sailors on board; every day that he did not come the murmurings grew worse and the officers resorted to harsher and longer whippings to keep the men in order. The army melted away daily, the officers scouring the towns and the roads to the north of the city to arrest ploughboys and shepherd boys and apprentices who were running for their lives away from the ships that waited, bobbing at the harbor wall, for the commander who did not come.

John saw the duke’s coach loaded aboard but kept the purse of diamonds on a string about his neck. The cows and the hens he penned up on Southsea Common and he took himself a lodging nearby. The landlord was surly and unhelpful; he had had soldiers billeted on him for months and his bills were never paid. John paid him directly from his own money, even though he knew that Buckingham would not remember to reimburse him, and then the man served him a little better.

On July nineteenth the king came riding down to inspect the fleet. The winds were blowing off shore; the ships were straining at their ropes as if they were willing to go, even if the men aboard had sulky faces. The king looked the ships over, but this time there was no handsome dinner on board the Triumph. All of them, even the king himself, waited for the Lord High Admiral.

He did not come.

John thought of his wife’s prediction that they would not sail until autumn and went out to the hills beyond the city and bought a wagonload of hay for the cow.

The king left Southwick and went hunting in the New Forest. He had no objection to the fleet being delayed while Buckingham went about his business in London. Other men would have risked a charge of treason and imprisonment in the Tower as a punishment for keeping the king waiting for an hour, but it seemed that Buckingham could do nothing that would offend the king. His Majesty laughed and said that the duke was a laggard, and spent the night at Beaulieu and hunted deer. The sport was good and the weather stood fair. On board the ships the soldiers, cooped up in their quarters, sweated in the crowded heat, and many had to be carried out suffering from seasickness or worse. The crews and the soldiers ate up the provisions which had been laid aboard for the voyage, and the ships’ stewards had to go out into Hampshire and Sussex to buy more food to restock the ships. Prices went up in the local markets and the little villages could not afford bread at the rate the fleet could pay. Buckingham was cursed at a hundred hungry firesides. And still he did not come.

John wrote to his wife that perhaps the whole thing would blow over. The fleet would not sail without the Lord High Admiral, and the Lord High Admiral did not come for the whole of July. Perhaps, John thought, he was bluffing, and had never meant to sail. Perhaps he was wiser and more skillful than anyone had allowed, as cunning as Cecil. Perhaps all this preparation, all this fear, all this grief, had been to give substance to the most tremendous trick of all time – frightening the French into withdrawing from La Rochelle without a shot being fired, without the expedition even leaving port. John remembered the trickery and mischief in Buckingham’s smile, his cleverness and his wit, and thought that if any man could win a war without sending his fleet out, Buckingham was the man.

John paid his landlord for the month of August and began to wonder if he might be spared. On the hot summer mornings he awoke with such a desire to live that he could taste it on his tongue, like lust. He walked on the harbor walls and looked out to sea. He felt the light touch of linen on his sun-warmed skin and the warm air on his face and felt like a youth, faint with awareness of his own beauty, of his own health. He walked on the pebbles of the seashore, sending flocks of gray- and brown-backed dunlin scattering before him, and felt the life pulsing through his body from his boots to his fingertips. On a fine day he could see the Isle of Wight in its green loveliness, and John thought he might take a little ferryboat over to the island and hunt for new plants folded in the secret hollows of its chalk downs.

He walked inland north of the city, where there were great forests. John walked under the branches and remembered his hunt for Sir Robert Cecil’s trees and the long journeys with the heavily laden carts. Sometimes he saw red deer and roe deer; always he watched his feet for a new fern, a new flower.

He did not walk to the east – there was a foul ill-drained marsh on that side of the city, lonely with the cry of wading birds and treacherous with tracks and deceptive paths. It stank of mud and decay under the hot summer sunshine, and when the heat haze shimmered above it he could not tell where the water began and the land melted unreliably away. In the drier fields the red poppies nodded their heads. It reminded John too much of their destination. He hated the flicker of sunlight on mud and water now; it was the light of death, he thought. After he had walked once to Farlington marshes he never went that way again.

Buckingham did not come until the end of August, just as the captains and officers were talking of having to disband for the winter rather than throw bad money after good on an expedition which was clearly not going to depart. Another month and the weather would break; it could take days to get out of harbor in the autumn, and no fleet could risk being separated running before a storm. It would be too late, it was too late, surely the Lord Admiral would be bound to see that it was too late – and then he came, sunny, smiling, delightful, in his best coach from London, and took breakfast at Captain Mason’s house in the High Street, as blithe and merry as if that had not been the very house where he had washed his hands of the blood of his soldiers the last time he came back from Rhé.

The rumor that Buckingham had arrived in the city reached Tradescant as he fed the last of his hay to the cows. For a moment he shuddered as if someone had walked on his grave. It was both a premonition of death and a flicker of desire. John shook his head at his own folly, brushed down his suit of clothes, put on his hat and walked around to the High Street.

The house was crowded, the outer courtyard filled with officers waiting for news and the usual hangers-on and favor-seekers. One man put his hand on Tradescant’s sleeve as he pushed through.

“He’s come to cancel the sailing, hasn’t he?”

“I don’t know. I have not spoken with him.”

“The captain of the Triumph says that they’ll need to revictual and rewater before they sail. And there’s no money to pay the chandlers. We’ll have to delay until the spring.”

“I don’t know,” Tradescant replied. “I don’t know any more than you do.”

The man slipped away in the crowd, and Tradescant pushed farther in. A man ahead of him turned at the tap on his shoulder and Tradescant recognized him.

“Mr. Tradescant!”

“It’s Felton, isn’t it? That was made captain?”

At once John saw that something was terribly wrong. The man’s face was pale, and two deep lines grooved either side of his mouth. “What’s the matter? Are you ill?”

He shook his head. “I prayed that I might take it, but I did not. She died in my arms.”

John edged slightly back. “Who died?”

“My wife. Oh! you need not fear I carry it. They put us out of the village, both of us, and did not let me back into my house until I had buried her on the cold ground where she lay and stripped myself naked and burned my clothes. Then they let me into my home, walking as naked as a sinner. But when I got back into the house, d’you know what I found?”

John shook his head.

“My little daughter, dead of hunger, behind the locked door. No one had gone in to feed her, they were all afraid of catching the plague, and besides, there was no food in the whole village.”

John was silent, facing the horror of the man’s story.

“I was never paid, you see,” Felton said, his voice a dull monotone. “Not the captain’s pay that was promised me, not the lieutenant’s pay that I had earned. Not my campaign money, not my discharge money. Not a penny. When I came home to my wife and daughter I had nothing but my Lord Admiral’s promise, and we could not eat that. When she sickened, I could not buy physic for her; I could not even buy food. When she died I had to bury her in the ground where she lay.”

He laughed shortly. “And they’ve enclosed it now. I cannot even get in to put up a cross at her head. It was common land. I thought I would plant a rosebush beside her grave, but now it is a sheep run, and my lord’s beasts patter over her sleeping face.”

John found he was scowling. “Before God I am sorry for you,” he said.

“And now we are to sail again,” Felton went on, his eyes burning in his white face. “Back to that damned island. It is all to be as it was before. More death, more pain, more folly. We will have to do it all again, and again and again until he has his fill of it.”

“Are you serving?” John asked.

“Who would go willingly who had been there once before? Would you?”

John shook his head. “I am bound by a promise to go,” he said.

“And I am bound by a promise too,” Felton said. “A different promise from you, I should think. A sacred promise to God.”

John nodded. “I will speak with him, when I can get near him,” he said. “I will not forget you, Felton. You shall have your pay and perhaps you can start again somewhere…”

“He has forgotten me,” Felton cried passionately. “But I will remind him. I will tell him what he has cost me; I will give him pain for pain.”

“That’s not the way. Be still, Felton; he is the duke, you cannot fight him any more than you can fight the king. He is untouchable.”

Felton shook his head in brief disagreement and turned away. Tradescant looked after him, saw the hunched shoulders and the way his hand strayed to his pocket and saw the outline, through the ragged clothes, of a knife. He glanced around. The place was packed with the duke’s retainers. When he saw one of the officers he could trust, he would warn him that Felton should be watched, and gently hustled out of the house. Then, when he had the duke’s ear, he would tell him that the man must be paid, must be compensated. That men who had followed the duke to certain death, and who had seen their comrades die beside them, could not be cast off as lightly as a mistress forgets an old lover who has fallen from favor.

There was a roar of laughter from the inner room and then a bellowing of a toast. Tradescant knew that his lord must be inside, at the heart of the party. Now he was near to seeing him again he found that his palms were wet with sweat and his throat dry. He rubbed his hands on his breeches, swallowed, and then pushed through the crowd, through the open double door and into the room.

The duke was seated at a table, a map spread before him, his green jacket ablaze with diamonds, his dark hair tumbled about his perfect face, laughing like a boy.

John fell back at the sight and a man behind him swore as he bumped into him, but John heard nothing. He had thought that he knew every line, every plane, of that face, from the untroubled forehead to the smooth cheekbones, but when he saw Buckingham again, in his vitality, in the brilliance of his beauty, he realized he had remembered nothing, only a shadow.

John felt himself smiling, then beaming, at the very sight of the man, and felt a blaze through his body which was not fear or resentment or hatred, but was joy, a wild intractable joy, that there should be such beauty in the world, that there should be such grace. That such a man had once loved John and taken him into a place where pain and pleasure were one. And at the moment, the long intervening months seemed a small price to pay for having once, just once, been the lover of such a man. As in a dream he saw Buckingham laughing at the head of the table, his black curls thrown back from his face, his black eyes glinting and that exquisite face flushed with wine and laughter; and at the same time he saw him leaning close in the shadowy light of the gilded cabin where the horn lantern swung on its hook with the haunting rhythm of the waves as if it were dancing with their blended shadows.

“Ah, it’s you,” John said with a deep glad sense of recognition and felt that his world, which had been upside-down since he had lost his master, was suddenly powerfully restored to him. He knew it was love, besotted, impossible love, and could feel no shame, nor any sense that it was wasted love. Its very madness was part of the joy of tasting it. It was the taste of life at the very edge of life. It was love as few men ever know it. It was passion, rare passion. A desire that does not even look for return, but is worth all the pain for the few moments of joy, and for knowing that joy to the edge of madness is a possibility. Without this love Tradescant thought he would have lived a quieter life, a steady life. With it he had been ablaze, in the very heart of the furnace of feeling.

Buckingham had not seen him. He was laughing with the gentlemen around him. “I swear it,” he shouted over the noise. “I will be avenged. We have been wronged by France and I will have satisfaction.”

Another great shriek of approval drowned out his words. Tradescant watched, smiling, as the duke shook back his black curls and laughed again. “I have the ear of the king!” he said.

“Aye, and other parts!” came a bawdy yell.

Buckingham grinned but he did not disagree. “Does anyone doubt that if I wish it we will be at the doors of Paris this time next year?” he said. “I say we will return to France, and not stop at some pox-ridden island but we will march on Paris itself and I will have my revenge.”

Tradescant pushed his way farther into the room. The men were a wedge of scented velvet and rich linen – the duke’s aristocratic friends and courtiers, who had been waiting and waiting in Portsmouth to give him a hero’s send-off. As they unwillingly stood aside Buckingham caught the movement and glanced down the room. His eyes met John’s and for a moment, for one blissful moment, there was nothing and no one but the master and the man looking at each other with a deep connection.

“My John,” Buckingham said softly, as sweet as a whisper after his bragging of a few moments earlier.

“My lord,” Tradescant replied.

Buckingham put one hand on the table and vaulted over it to Tradescant’s side. He put his hands on his shoulders.

“Did you bring everything?” he asked simply.

“I have everything you commanded,” John said steadily. There was not a word that could have betrayed them. Only the two of them knew that the duke was asking if John was still his and his alone; and John was answering: yes, yes, yes.

“Where are you lodged?” Buckingham asked him.

“At a little house on Southsea Common.”

“Get your things loaded and stowed in my cabin; we sail today.” Buckingham turned toward his place at the table.

“My lord!” At the urgency in his tone Buckingham paused.

“What is it, John?”

“Stay a moment. Go down to the harbor and listen to your commanders,” John said earnestly. “They are saying we may not be able to sail. Take some advice, my lord. Let’s proceed cautiously.”

“Cautiously! Cautiously!” Buckingham threw back his head and laughed and the room laughed with him. “I am going to free the Protestants of La Rochelle and give the French king such a trouncing that he will regret his impertinence to us. I shall have Queen Elizabeth back on her throne in Bohemia, and I shall take the war to the very doors of Paris.”

There was a confused hurrah at the bragging. John scowled around at the gentlemen who had never been closer to a battle than a naval review. “Don’t say such things. Not here. Don’t speak like this in Portsmouth. There are families here still grieving for the men who went with you last time and will never come home again. Don’t jest, my lord.”

“I? Jest?” The duke’s arched eyebrows flew upward. He turned to the room. “Tradescant thinks I jest!” he exclaimed. “But I tell him and I tell you all that this war with France is not finished; it will not be finished until we have won. And when we have beaten them we will take on the Spanish. No papist mob shall stand against us; I am for the true king and the true faith.”

“And where will you get your army, Steenie?” someone cried from the back. “All the men who marched with you last time are dead or injured or sick or insane.”

“I shall press-gang them,” he cried. “I shall buy them. I shall take them out of the jails, and out of the hospitals for the mad. I shall order them to come on pain of treason. I shall take boys from their school desks, I shall take farmers from their ploughs. Does anyone doubt that I can force my will on this whole kingdom? And if I want to wager half of England to avenge this slight on my honor, I can do it!”

John felt as if he were clinging to a runaway horse that nothing could stop. He laid a rough hand on his lord’s sleeve and pulled him close so that he could whisper in his ear. “My lord, I beg you, this is no way to plan a campaign. It’s too late in the year; we will meet the autumn storms at sea; when we get there the weather will be bitter. You remember the island; there was no shelter, there were the stinking marshes and the constant storms. They will have reinforced the citadel, and it cost us four thousand lives last time and we still came home in defeat. My lord, don’t take us there. Please, I beg you, think again. Think in silence, think when you’re sober, not when you have a room of puppies barking at your every word. Think, Villiers. Before God I would die rather than see you there again.”

Buckingham turned in John’s grip but he did not throw off his hand, as he could have done. Just as he had done in the long-ago fruit garden beside the warmed peach trees, he put his own hand on top of John’s and John could feel the warmth of the long soft fingers and the hardness of the rings.

“We have to go,” he replied, his voice low. “A victory is the only thing which will pull me clear with the country. I would have to go if it took the life of every man in England.”

John met his lord’s dark determined gaze. “You would destroy this country for your own triumph?”

Buckingham put his mouth very close to John’s ear. The silky curls tickled John’s neck. “Yes,” he whispered. “A thousand times over.”

“Then you are mad, my lord,” John said steadily. “And your country’s enemy.”

“Then cut me down like a mad dog,” Buckingham dared him with a wolfish grin. “Behead me for treason. Because my madness will run its course. I have to win the Isle of Rue, John. I don’t care what it costs.”

It was John who drew his hand away first; it was John who broke their interlocked gaze. Buckingham let him go and snapped his fingers at one of his companions, and took his arm in John’s place. “Come,” he said. “I must get my hair curled and then I shall sail for France.”

There was a roar of laughter and approval. Tradescant, sick and cold, turned away. The duke and his companions passed through the crowd and into the narrow corridor. One of the French officers bustled up.

“My lord duke! I bring news! The best news in the world!”

Buckingham stopped, the crowd behind him pressing forward in the corridor to hear.

“ La Rochelle has broken out! The Protestants are free and the French army is defeated! The French are suing for terms.”

Buckingham reeled, fighting for sobriety. “Never!”

“Indeed, yes!” the man declared, his English becoming less and less clear in his own excitement. “We have won! We have won!”

“Then we need not sail,” John thought aloud. “My God, we need not sail.”

Buckingham was suddenly powerful and decisive. “This alters everything,” he said.

“It does,” Tradescant agreed, pushing through to his side. “Thank God, yes. It does.”

“I must speak with the king,” Buckingham said. “Now is the time to strike against France; we need to go at once, we need to raise a greater army. We should go through the Netherlands, and then…”

“My lord,” John said desperately. “There is no need. Now we are excused. La Rochelle is free, our wrongs are avenged.”

Buckingham shook his head and laughed his wild boyish laugh. “John, after all the trouble I have taken to get here, d’you think I shall go peaceably home again without a cannon being fired! I am wild for a fight, and the men are wild for a fight! We will go to the very heart of France. Now is the time for an all-out attack, now they are failing. God knows how far we could go. We could take and keep French castles, French lands!”

He slapped the French officer on the back and stepped forward. Felton suddenly appeared at his side, pushing through the crowd. Tradescant recognized him with a gasp of fear, saw his eyes were wild and his hand was gripped on the knife in his pocket. He saw the officer who should protect the duke lounging in the doorway, his face buried in a cup of wine.

Buckingham turned to greet a new arrival and swept his graceful bow. There was a slice of time, which seemed to hold and wait, like a petal from a blossom lingering on its fall.

Tradescant saw Felton’s determined face and knew that the great love of his life, his master, was not, after all, untouchable.

“Save us from him,” Tradescant said softly. “Do it, Felton.”